Broken Frontier

From Wetworks with While Portacio at Wildstorm, X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four at Marvel, and One-Sided Bargains at Image to his three new Vertigo Crossing Midnight, God Save The Queen and The Faker, and beyond, writer Mike Carey is leaving his indelible mark on comicdom. He stopped by to chat about his upcoming releases and what they mean to him.

Part One

BROKEN FRONTIER: I want to move from Wetworks to your newest upcoming Vertigo release, Crossing Midnight. This is the story of two twins who were born on the opposite side of the day. Having twins yourself, is this something that came from your own life?

MIKE CAREY: That’s definitely where the original idea came from. I wrote a bit of this story in the “On the Ledge” column that appears in all the Vertigo books.  When my wife became pregnant we didn’t know until the second trimester that it was twins.  So we got to the 13th week of the pregnancy and she was in so much pain that I had to drive her to the hospital in the middle of the night.  And we both thought she was having a miscarriage, so we were absolutely desperate.  But that’s when we got this fantastic news that it was twins.

So we weren’t losing the baby, in fact, there were two of them and the pain was just a result of that.

But yeah, watching the twins growing up you’re fascinated by the similarities and the differences.  The whole sort of telepathy thing they’ve got going is enormously interesting.  There is also the fact that they are “variations on the theme,” that they’re not the same, and in fact are very different people.  Yeah, Crossing Midnight does draw on our experiences of having twins in the family.  In that sense it’s a very personal book

BF: This book is set in Japan though and is said to have a lot of Asian influences.  Why did you decide to set it there?

MC: The main reason is because a lot of the thematic influences that you see in the book are from the East – Japanese manga, Japanese and Korean horror movies and so on.  When I made the initial pitch to Karen Berger I said that the book was going to be like Miyazaki meets Takashe Miike.  To mix of lyrical beautiful fantasy of Miyazaki movies with that really visceral horror of Miike’s work.  And there are other Japanese horror auteurs in the mix there too, so Japan just seemed like the natural setting.

But we’re also playing very heavily on Japanese folklore in the story, especially the animistic belief that everything has a spirit – that every object and aspect of life has a spirit that inhabits it, which is not specifically part of Shinto or Japanese religion but more of a folk belief comparable to fairies, leprechauns and all that.  So there again it made sense to set it in Japan.

And we actually decided to set it specifically in Nagasaki because that brings a lot of resonances for Western audiences.

BF: Did you feel a need to use Nagasaki specifically to bring that resonance to Western audiences?

MC: Well I don’t want to give too much away because that is where the story starts.  With the book we’re really playing with the idea of boundaries and crossing boundaries and Nagasaki is sort of a boundary for the whole of Japan.  It was the first open port in Japan that allowed Western ships, when all the other Japanese ports were aggressively closed.  It was the first city in Japan to have Europeans living in it and to have a European quarter.  It was also the first city in Japan to have a church built in it.  So it’s always had this openness and cosmopolitan aspect to it that residents of Nagasaki have always been very proud of.

But then along comes World War II and Nagasaki was the target of the second atomic bomb.  That created a real sense of tension between this tradition of “loving the alien” and the tragedy of what actually happened because of the clash of cultures in WW2.  One of the twins Kai, tells, us in issue one that what happens to him and his sister couldn’t have happened anywhere else on Earth - that part of their childhood experience was predetermined by the fact that they were born in Nagasaki.  It’s a consequence of what you could call the psychological fallout, the mindset that the people of Nagasaki now have because of what has happened to them.

BF: Based on that it sounds like you did a lot of research for this book.

MC: Yes and no.  Yes, but it was all second-hand research.  I’ve never been there.  I do have relatives there and I have talked to them extensively and I hope that I will be able to visit there very soon.  But so far it’s all been second-hand and in a way I’ll be really happy when I am finally able to visit the city and stand there on my own two feet. [Laughs]  At the moment this is a “Nagasaki of the mind”.

BF: And what about the Japanese influences?  You mentioned Miyazaki and Miike.  Are you a fan of a lot of the stuff that comes out of there?

MC: I love Horror Manga.  I think Junji Ito, who did Uzamaki, Gyo and Tomie, is a genius and an absolute master of the comic strip form.  I like Hideshi Hino a lot.  I love the Miyazaki movies.  Ji-Woon Kim’s stuff.  And I think Miike is a fascinating director.  I admit that Miike is the one that I’m the most ambivalent about.  Some of his films are amazing and others don’t work for me at all.  The Great Yokai War was just a mess.

BF: Miike does have a bit of a reputation to be like that.  But he does put out a lot of films each year doesn’t he?

MC: Yes, he is very prolific.  You can’t hit on all cylinders all the time.

But yeah, in some respect this book is sort of a hymn of praise to that stuff and my response to those influences because they’re pretty big in my life at the moment.  A lot of what I watch and read comes from the East.

BF: Actually, one of my favorite movies right now is Azumi from Japan, which I can’t seem to get out of my DVD player.  Part of that might be because my father has always been very big in Judo, which comes from Japan and sort of a side bonus to that has been learning very little Japanese and Azumi is the first movie where I understood any of it.

MC: [Laughs] Have you seen Ong Bak, the Thai martial arts movie?  That is a wonderful, wonderful experience.  I can’t recommend it enough.

BF: Actually, I just put it on the top of my Netflix list.

MC: The same director and actor have actually made a second movie, Warrior King, but that one isn’t as good.  The first one is just a superb riff on all the martial arts staples.

BF: In talking of movies like that, a lot of what Western audiences immediately think of when they see one is martial arts, sword fights, and the like.  Are you going to play with a lot of those elements or are you trying to stay more towards the folklore items?

MC: It’s a mix of horror and fantasy, but maybe mix is the wrong word because they remain as two very different elements within the book.  It’s like a balancing act – setting lyrical poetic fantasy against really gutwrenching horror.  Those are the poles on which we’re constructing the book.

There are sword fights though, because an awful lot of the plot centers around swords and other objects with blades and edges.  One of the main characters, Aratsu, is the kami of the swords.  He is the guy who has dominion over anything that has a point, edge, or blade.  And Toshi, the female twin, learns as she’s growing up that knives can’t hurt her.  That they refuse to hurt her and they will shatter or bend their blades rather than pierce her skin.  So swords and people’s relationships with swords and knives is a theme that will keep coming up again and again in the book.

In later issues there is a pair of scissors that becomes an important character.

BF: A pair of scissors?!?!

MC: Yup.  A pair of scissors called Uso-Tsuki.  She’s a terrible liar.

BF: Now that is something that I can’t wait to see.  In speaking of the main characters, the two twins are Kai (the male) and Toshi (the female), how did you decide to split them and choose which character would reflect what?  Have you found yourself using one or the other to highlight the two distinct influences on the book?

MC: It’s more like one twin is embedded in all the otherworldly stuff, while the other isn’t at all. Toshi is in it up to her neck.  And the other twin, Kai, initially appears to have absolutely no affinity for it.  He appears to be completely rooted in the everyday, human, mundane world that the rest of us live in.  As the series goes on we realize that there is something strange and different about Kai too but it’s more subtle.  Toshi is the one who is claimed by this other world, the world of the kami, from day one.  So from the start it seems like it is more her story than it is his and he’s just the narrator who brings her story to us, but more and more as the story goes on he becomes an active part in it himself.

BF: Which one is the older one?

MC: Kai is older but only by about 10 minutes or so.  He is the one born before midnight and then Toshi is born after him.

BF: I ask because oftentimes in a situation where there is an older brother and younger sister, the older brother tends to be very protective of the sister.  And I know they aren’t that far apart but does that play into this at all?

MC: Kai is intensely protective of Toshi.  I don’t know if it’s necessarily because he’s older since the difference is only a few minutes but he sees her being pulled away from the family in ways that are very traumatic to her and he wants to rescue her from it if he can.  The situation that she finds herself in makes him want to follow her but he can’t.  There are reasons that he’s always an outsider with respect to the things that are happening to her.  So yes, his being protective is an important element.

BF: You have two boys. Have you modeled any of the interaction of the characters on your kids?

MC: Only indirectly.  There isn’t any one to one mapping.  Some of the ways Kai and Toshi interact with each other are drawn from my sons, but seen through a distorting lens.

BF: Your artist on this book is Jim Fern.  How did you end up working with him on it?

MC: Mostly because I saw the work he had done on Fables.  He’d done some fill in issues on Fables and I thought they were brilliant.  Plus, we wanted someone who had a very realistic style. 

I think there really are two ways you can play a fantasy book – you can either have a really stylized, cartoon-y style, which effaces or scuffs over the boundary between the real and the unreal because it makes everything unreal.  Or you can do something that is almost photo-perfect, that is very clear and fully rendered.  Because when the fantastic elements come in in this very realistic style you have to accept them as having real weight.  We decided we wanted to go the second way, to insist on the reality of everything – not matter how fantastic or strange.  And Jim is the perfect fit for that.

BF: Interesting that you should say that because with a lot of horror movies, one of the things that is always brought up in the cinematic critiques is when the movie plays a more realistic style, once the horror elements are brought in, the impact is felt a lot harder than if it wasn’t filmed realistically.  Was that a thought for you when deciding on an artist and style to accentuate and force people to see it as real?

MC: Yes, very much so.  That’s really why we went that route.  There’s a scene in the very end of the first issue which is very Takeshi Miike in flavor.  A sudden wanton, horrible act of violence and you realize that someone has changed the rules of the game you thought you were playing.

BF: With a story and influences like this has there been any effort to give the book a more manga feel?

MC: No.  Definitely not.  That would have been one way to do it, but no.  I think it’s always problematic to imitate manga styles.  It can be done, you can get Western artists who can do an imitation of manga style – Jill Thompson’s work on Death’s Door looks very convincingly manga.  But I didn’t want to go down that road because I’m not actually quoting these guys even though they are huge influences on the work.  It’s still me and Jim doing our own thing.  It’s very much a Western riff on many of these themes and styles and storytelling.  We’re not doing a pastiche.

BF: Now, we’ve talked about some of the themes and other aspects are mentioned in the preview, but not much about the story and conflict of the book.  Is there a set story that you have in mind for Crossing Midnight?

MC: What we have here is a situation where we’ve got the twins growing up and at some point it becomes very clear that Toshi doesn’t entirely belong to the human world.  There is another place and another power that has a claim on her, or asserts a claim on her and that’s why she has that visitation from Aratsu, the kami of the swords.

In some extent, it’s because of something that was done before they were born.  There was a promise or bargain made and it gets called in.  So that’s kind of the first layer of the explanation, but then there’s an aspect of the story that goes back generations and explains why these things are happening now.  So there is a situation that unfolds slowly thought the first year of the book and into the second year and ultimately everything ties together in a very clear and explicit way.  But we’re not putting all our cards on the table to begin with.

BF: I would expect nothing less from you.  You’ve been excellent at doing that in your work. Is there a set ending for the story that you have in mind?

MC: Yeah, if it does find an audience and it does do well we’d like to do it for about five years and sixty issues and then like Lucifer, we’ll bring it to a definitive conclusion.

BF: Yeah, I’m actually very happy that that book is finally finished.  I had read the first arc and a few of the other issues and I knew that if I started reading it monthly it would be one of those books I couldn’t wait for. 

And actually, if you want a bit of high praise, one of the workers at my LCS used to yell at me all the time for not reading it and he actually said he thought it was better than Sandman.

MC: Jesus!  I don’t think I would make that claim, but I was such a big fan of Sandman that Lucifer was almost the perfect job for me.  I loved writing that book.

BF: Well, I guess you don’t get many chances to write the Devil.

MC: Very true! [Laughs]

Continued tomorrow...